‘North by Northwest’ as It Was Meant to Be Seen: Big

Pity the modern viewer who has watched “North by Northwest” only on a tablet-size screen. The film, Alfred Hitchcock’s mistaken-identity thriller from 1959, is one of those movies that really need to be seen large — especially for that brilliantly filmed scene that pits Cary Grant against a crop-dusting airplane.

Aficionados will have a chance to savor the full sweep when Fathom Events and the TCM Big Screen Classic Series bring the movie back into more than 700 theaters for showings on Sunday, April 2, and Wednesday, April 5 (2 and 7 p.m. each day; details at fathomevents.com). Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an adman who is mistaken for an intelligence agent and finds himself running for his life.

The scene in which he is pursued by someone in a crop duster is among the most famous in cinematic history, and one on the face of Mount Rushmore is pretty great, too. A. H. Weiler, reviewing the film in The New York Times, called it “the year’s most scenic, intriguing and merriest chase.”